Kill Me Again

He didn’t answer. And that was not like him.

“Freddy?” She walked through the house, checking every room. It wasn’t that big a place, so searching it was neither difficult nor time-consuming. The dining room and kitchen were one large, open room, separated only by a countertop, with French doors on the far side leading to the deck and fenced-in backyard.

She headed in that direction when there was no response from inside the house, turning on lights as she went along. She hated being in the dark. And she especially hated being alone in the dark. It was just too creepy.

There was a very large doggy door—she’d had to have one custom-made to accommodate Freddy’s bulk—just to the side of the French doors. But it was very unlike him not to hear a car pulling in, and come bounding from wherever he might be to see who was at the door, much less come at her call. Something about this was off. And something about the house felt off, too.

An icy chill danced up her spine and along the back of her neck. She shivered, and quickly unlocked and opened the French doors, eager to be with her dog, and feeling the earliest warning signs of impending panic. If anything ever happened to him…

“Freddy!” she shouted as she stepped out onto the redwood deck. “Freddy, come!”

She used her most commanding tone, but even to her own ears, there was a hint of fear wrapped within it. And then, quickly, fear was overshadowed by relief. Freddy came bounding toward her, appearing out of the darkness like a ghost from the very farthest part of the back lawn. His brindle markings made him all but invisible in the dark. But there he was, running toward her and chomping away on whatever was dangling from his jowls.

“What in the world? Freddy, what have you got? Give it to me. Give it to me, come on.” She tried to wrestle the wet thing—a piece of meat, she realized—from his jaws, but he got a better grip and then swallowed it whole.

“Freddy! Was that a steak? Where on earth could you have gotten a steak?”

Freddy belched loudly, then jumped as if startled by the sound, and looked around him to locate the source of it.

“Where did you get that?” Olivia demanded. “Where, huh?”

Freddy sat, his tail thumping the wood.

“I swear, Freddy. You didn’t kill something, did you?” It would be alien to him to harm anything, she thought. When he spotted wildlife, he wanted to play with it, not eat it. He was a gentle giant. Besides, it really had looked like a good cut of meat to her, not a mangled woodland creature.

This was just bizarre. She stepped back inside and reached for the little wine rack, where she kept a large flashlight, just because it fit so nicely there. Then she went back outside and across the deck, the flashlight’s beam guiding her way. She’d turned on the outside lights now, and they helped, too, as she walked from the deck to the lawn, and then followed the fence all the way around the backyard. She didn’t see anything. No meat lying around, and no sign that any small animals had been devoured.

Freddy circumnavigated the lawn right by her side, but he didn’t give away a thing.

“Well, go figure, pal. Apparently you have yet another fan,” she told him. She wasn’t all that surprised. Freddy was something of a local celebrity. Everyone who met him loved him, and well-meaning neighbors sometimes left him treats, despite Olivia’s softly spoken objections. Crouching, she set the light aside and took his face in her hands. “Don’t you ever take candy from strangers, Frederick. Do you understand me?”

“Woof!” said Fred, and then he turned and galloped back toward the house, as if daring her to race him, his long ears flapping in the breeze.

Olivia declined the challenge and walked back more slowly. She took one more look around, but by then she was feeling a little sheepish about her case of nerves. Okay, a lot had happened today. A man had been shot. But that didn’t mean that her own ghosts were going to come floating out of the distant past tonight. No one had tried to kill her. And Aaron’s situation had nothing whatsoever to do with her own.

She locked the house up tight, took a quick shower and went to bed. But sleep didn’t come easily. She kept thinking about Aaron, and how different he was from what she had expected. And she kept wondering if he was lying awake, frustrated and alone.

It wasn’t like her to spend so much time thinking about any man. But she couldn’t seem to help herself where he was concerned.

She’d spent most of her adult life in hiding from the violent man she’d narrowly escaped so many years ago. She’d avoided romantic relationships ever since. But she had allowed herself, in her weaker moments, an imaginary one in her mind, because it was harmless and next to impossible. Aaron Westhaven wasn’t real to her. He was an ideal. He stood for the antithesis of violence. He was tender, sensitive, affectionate, wonderful. She knew he couldn’t be as perfect a human being in real life as he had become in her own mind. But it hadn’t mattered, because there had never been a chance she would meet him in real life anyway. And she had imagined that, if she did, he would be a huge disappointment.

But now she had met him. And he was far from disappointing. Something inside her seemed to have broken loose and started all kinds of silly chemical reactions. He wasn’t what she’d expected him to be, personality-wise. But physically, he was far, far more. He was one of the most incredibly handsome men she’d ever set eyes on.

What if he wasn’t too good to be real? What if he turned out to be all the things she had allowed herself to imagine he was? What then?

She sat up in the bed, scowling hard and wondering just who the hell had taken over her brain. Professor Olivia Dupree was not a giggling sorority girl with a crush. And besides, no matter what the psychiatrists and anthropologists said, she firmly believed that human beings were not designed to fall in love. Romantic love was a made-up idea with no real basis. It was what people wished they could feel. But it wasn’t real. She knew that. And Aaron knew it, too, depicted it powerfully and repeatedly in his novels. That was why she connected so strongly with his work. So what was wrong with her now?

She punched the pillow, lay back down and tried to sleep.

And she did begin to drift off—right up until she heard the unmistakable sound of the French doors swinging open with their telltale creak, followed by footsteps sneaking silently across her kitchen floor.

Aaron tossed and turned, and tried to sleep, but he didn’t have any success at all. Every time someone passed in the hall beyond his closed hospital-room door, he came to attention, watching, listening, waiting, certain it was his assailant, back to finish the job.

It was worse when the passerby did pause near his door, and worst of all when they actually came inside. A nurse wanting to check his vitals or administer meds or adjust the IV or whatever. They came in what felt like fifteen-minute intervals, always advising him to relax and get some sleep when they left. Right.

He wished he could remember something. Anything besides the terrifying vision of committing cold-blooded murder. And he tried. He said his own name over and over in his mind. Aaron Westhaven. Aaron Westhaven. Aaron Westhaven. He tried to visualize his fingers racing over a keyboard, typing the words of some blockbuster. But none of it felt familiar.

None of it.

He drifted off once, only to see himself standing over a lifeless body, looking down at the bloodstained white shirt of a motionless corpse, the smoking gun in his hand, its gleaming barrel still warm. He could smell the gunpowder. The vision was that vivid, that real.

He came awake with a start that had him sitting upright in the bed. Memory? Or nightmare? That made twice now that his mind had filled itself with the image of killing someone. What the hell kind of man was he? Not the sensitive geek Olivia Dupree apparently thought he was, that was for damn sure.

He had to get to the bottom of this mess, and he had to do it now, tonight. He felt like a living, breathing target lying there, and dammit, he knew he was supposed to trust his instincts above all else, though he didn’t know where that knowledge came from. Was it something he’d lived by, or something his injured brain had just made up to fill space?

Fed up, he kicked off the covers, climbed out of the bed and went into the little bathroom off his room, so he could use the mirror there to help him get the bandages off his head.

It still ached, but not as much without the too-tight mummy wrap. Creeping to the door and peering out, he watched the activity at the nurses’ station for a while. Every so often the tall desk would be deserted as the nurses headed in different directions, tending to patients, answering their call buttons.

The place was clearly understaffed.

Good.

He spotted the key to Olivia’s car hanging on a peg near the desk. He’d been at the door, listening intently to every second of the conversation between her and Dr. Overton earlier. He knew about the doc’s kid joyriding in a borrowed SUV, about Olivia leaving her own car there overnight to take the bigger one home. He’d seen the keys get hung up there, and knew what kind of car she drove.

He grabbed the zip-top bag holding his few belongings from the drawer beside the bed, tucked Olivia Dupree’s business card inside it and waited. The stuff in the bag had been examined by the police and returned to him, and it consisted of a pocket watch, a key ring with a rearing stallion on it and bearing a single key with a P engraved on its face, and a packet of Big Red chewing gum. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had to his name at the moment, and he wasn’t leaving it behind.

The next time every nurse was way from the desk, Aaron slipped out of his room, padded along the hall and lifted Olivia’s car key right off the rack. Then he turned and moved farther along the hallway, passing patients’ rooms, peering inside until he spotted a man in a bed who looked to be in the vicinity of his own size and shape. The patient was sound asleep, no nurses hovering nearby. So Aaron ducked into the room, moved quietly to the closet, opened it and saw the man’s clothes stored there just as his own had been.

Ducking into the bathroom, he donned the clothes—jeans, a black T-shirt and a denim jacket—as fast as he could. The running shoes were two sizes too small, so he didn’t bother exchanging his own scuffed but expensive-looking black ones with those. Then he had to watch and wait for the nurses to get busy again before he could slip out of the room, toward the door marked Stairs.

Once in the stairwell, he figured he was home free. He took that route all the way to the ground floor. No one noticed him as he headed toward the exit, or if they did, they didn’t say anything. He didn’t take any more time than necessary, looking as if he knew exactly where he was going, exuding confidence and purpose and probably a hint of impatience.

Finally he was passing through the exit doors, and into the parking lot. And only then did he breathe a huge sigh of relief, followed by a refreshing lungful of fresh, cool, summer night air. It tasted good here, he thought, and wondered if that was something new to him. Maybe he lived in a city.

It took him a few minutes of searching to find Olivia’s car, but only a few. It was the only white hybrid SUV in the parking lot. He hit the unlock button, and it flashed its headlights at him in response.

Moments later he was pulling in to the scarce traffic of a Shadow Falls night.

He gave himself time to get a few blocks away before pulling over again. Then, feeling safe—or as safe as a man who knew someone with a gun was out there looking for him could feel—he took the time to turn on the dash-mounted GPS device. He touched the screen, chose Navigate To and then looked at his selections. Street Address, City Center, Point of Attraction, Home.

Smiling, he touched the word Home.

Olivia Dupree’s address popped up onto the screen, and a female voice said, “Left turn ahead.”

4

Olivia sat up slowly, her heart pounding so hard she would have sworn whoever was in her house could hear it as clearly as she did. “Freddy,” she whispered harshly. “Freddy, where are you?”